The Boxing Standard

An online journal of boxing.

Saturday, August 09, 2008

NBC Muffs First Day of Olympics Boxing Coverage

What an embarrassingly poor presentation of this year’s Olympic boxing by NBC so far!

The first afternoon telecast on CNBC, which was taped earlier Saturday, August 9, began by showing the same fight, between middleweights Emilio Correa of Cuba and Jarrod Fletcher of Australia, twice, from start to finish.

Although Correa deservedly won easily, he had an eight-count called against him in the fourth and final round when he kneeled to the canvas after a combination to the head by Fletcher, although those punches did not seem to do much damage. Even though they showed this fight twice, and it was pretaped, they never showed a replay of this knockdown.

Announcers Bob Papa and Teddy Atlas did correctly point out that the punches Fletcher landed which caused Correa to kneel down did not even result in one point being tallied by these judges. Generally they did a good job savaging these supposedly reformed Olympic boxing rules. They even had a nice replay of a Chinese boxer getting smashed directly in the face, without a point being scored for his opponent. And they now even have open scoring in Olympic boxing.

The fight they likely skipped involved Russian middleweight Matvey Korobov, a 2005 and 2007 amateur world champion, who outpointed Naim Terbunja of Sweden, 18-6. Korobov is a favorite to win a gold medal this year. Plus, for the American-centric NBC, his parents and older brother reportedly live in Florida, and he plans to turn pro after the Olympics.

Most of the boxing in the U.S. will be on CNBC, live at about midnight EDT (more likely with the boxing part of those shows beginning around 1:30 AM EDT) and taped starting at 5 PM EDT most days. The boxing competition runs from August 9-20 and August 22-24, with the finals on August 23 and 24.

Interestingly, although NBCOlympics.com will stream a lot of the action (supposedly only available in the U.S.), there are no plans to stream any boxing – perhaps because they know that so many people in boxing love to brag that they are too lazy or stupid to use the Internet. Of course, this will only encourage more people to seek out these videos online, whether or not the sites offering them are provided by rights holders or by people who just decide to stream them for free.

Here are some links to articles which will help you do that, assuming, of course, that you are not one of boxing’s proud technophobic idiots: